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Aneshka Colas-Dickson, native Portlander and vice president and CFO of Colas Construction, began to see a new side of her home city last year. In September 2010, she was sworn in as a commissioner on the Portland Development Commission.

“I’m so honored to serve on this board and stand by the mission of PDC, which is to bring together resources to achieve Portland’s vision of a diverse and sustainable  community with healthy neighborhoods, a vibrant central city, a strong regional economy and quality jobs and housing for all,” she said.

Colas-Dickson is the youngest person to serve as a development commissioner in Portland, which makes her both an asset and an outlier. While her unique perspective balances the board’s composition, her relative youthfulness still draws attention.

“I kind of take it as a compliment,” Colas-Dickson said. “As a woman, I want to look young … but at the same time, I’ve been working at my company for 11 years. I’m used to dealing with many different issues and people in our tough industry.”

Coming from an entrepreneurial, multicultural family adds another layer to Colas-Dickson’s unique perspective. Her father, Hermann Colas Jr., owned a distillery in his native Haiti before moving to Oregon and founding Colas Construction in 1997. Aneshka, her brother Andrew, and their father remain the company’s core executive team.

“We all love and respect each other so much that there haven’t been problems in terms of relationships,” Colas-Dickson said. “But when do you put this stuff away? We spend the majority of family time on business.”

At Colas Construction, they are not focused as much on big crane projects as they are in fulfilling their mission to improve the community by working on tenant improvement projects and affordable housing opportunities. And the firm’s motivation to help people reaches far beyond Portland’s city limits. “(Last year) we felt really hopeless just in terms of survival for our business,” she said. “But when the earthquake hit (Haiti), it really put everything into perspective.”

After catastrophe struck the Caribbean nation last January, the Colas family took action. An outpouring of support from people in the construction industry helped the family establish The Colas Foundation Fund, which raised more than $50,000 for Haiti.

The motivation for all of Colas-Dickson’s community service-from Haiti relief to her volunteer work at the PDC-is born out of devotion to her three children and their futures. “The time I spend working has definitely increased and my sleep has decreased,” she said, “but I’m thankful for my mother, who helps with the kids and for my husband, who has been phenomenal, supportive, and happy for me.”

Fortunately, when Colas-Dickson is busy at the PDC, her mother can sometimes flip on the public access channel so that her kids can proudly watch their mom, hard at work.

What was the best piece of advice you ever received?

“I have received a lot of advice, even more since joining the PDC board. The common themes of the advice that resonate with me are to maintain a positive attitude, put out full effort and persevere. I was raised to treat people from all backgrounds with respect, and that remains strongly instilled in me to this day.”

Who was your mentor, and how did he or she help shape you as a person?

“My parents had the greatest influence in shaping who I am as a person today. I come from a very dynamic, multicultural family, and it has had a very profound influence on what I’ve become. My parents taught my brothers and me to never feel limited on achieving greatness, no matter what we chose to become. We were expected to always think outside the box and to never place any limitations on what we could accomplish. My parents are generous, to a fault at times, and they have sacrificed so much of themselves for us, their children. My father is a very passionate, opinionated, extremely intense and determined individual. He is a visionary and has so much strength. My mother has this great sense of humor, is nurturing, kind-hearted, and confronts life with great optimism. I’m extremely close to her, and we just have a lot of fun together. I feel very fortunate to have been brought up in such a colorful and vibrant family. I like to think that I have a very balanced combination of these personality traits in me. My husband may add that the balance falls more on the side of my father (especially the opinionated aspect), and he would like to see me work on being a little more centered between the two.”

Tell me something about yourself most people wouldn’t know.

My name, Aneshka, is Czechoslovakian. My parents chose the name from an international name book, but as a child I hated my name because it was so different and was never pronounced correctly … I have learned to appreciate my unique name, but it took me a long time to get to this point.